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The adventures of one girl, eating well, on a budget

Clearin’ Out

Today was all about eating leftovers to pave the way for this $40/week experiment. I ate the other portion of my soup from last night for lunch, used up the rest of my veggies in a salad for dinner, and had leftover pasta from a couple days ago for supper.

I even roasted an eggplant that’s been sitting in my fridge ever since it called my name at a farmers market, but to be honest, I have no idea what I’m going to do with it yet.

My point is… I’ve purged the leftovers. Next, I sat down and took stock of what I have that’s waiting to be made and what staple items I’m running low on. Based on that, I planned a few meals to fill the gaps in the coming week, made my list and headed to Kroger.

Including some staple items and a few things that will last me much longer than through the week (olive oil, a block of parmesan, peanut butter), I made it out of there for $28.10. Not bad right? Just wait…

A rough guesstimate of the things I have sitting around that I plan on using this week landed me at $42. Ouch. Now, this is including things that will last me beyond this week (bags of frozen veg, cans of tomatoes, lentils, oatmeal, cereal, nutella, two boxes of granola bars… you get the idea) but, since my weekly budget was blown by just the things that were in my kitchen before I went to the store, I think this week is a bit of a bust. I’m going to chalk it up to getting the ball rolling, since the stuff that previously existed in my kitchen (I’m looking at you, $8 bag of shrimp) was not purchased with a budget in mind.